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Dec. 9th, 2003 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynToday would be my mom’s 79th birthday, and it’s a day I always feel a little mixed up about. Most people seem to recognize the anniversary of someone’s death, but I tend to be more focused on remembering their birthdays, possibly because I spent most of my life acknowledging that day. Though the day of her death is horribly imprinted on my brain, the day of her birth is more significant to me. It always reminds me that, years after her death, I’m still not over it, and I wonder how long it will be before it happens, or if it ever can.
I used to know a woman who was a fairly respected poet, and in her poems, she often examined her feelings about her father and his death. We were talking after my mom died about the grieving process, and I mentioned how exasperated everyone around me was already, even though it had been only a few weeks, that I hadn’t got over the death. Everyone’s parents die, I suppose the thinking goes, so get on with it. She talked about how she still hadn’t got over it, and I knew that from reading her work, but she didn’t discuss it much otherwise except as occasion warranted. I asked how she finally got to a point where she didn’t think about her dad every hour of every day. She told me “I never have. I just stopped talking about it.” That really affected me, because I think that, especially in western cultures, we expect people to shut up about it, we expect grieving to be a quick and tidy process, and one that leaves no lingering scars. I know there are people who’ve known me for years reading this right now, and thinking, “oh, get over it finally, for god’s sake.” Culturally, there isn’t a lot of room for the emotional differences in our individual makeups, an acknowledgement of how none of us handle things the same way, and how different the circumstances are around anyone’s specific loss. I’ve tried on a few occasions to tell people how agonizing, gruesome, and torturous my mother’s last day was, but if I’m able to handle it, they usually aren’t, and I’ve never finished the story any time I’ve tried to tell it — either through my own inability, or they begged me to stop.
For most of my life, my parents and I did not get along at all. Our relationship was rocky, to say the least, violent, and emotionally stunted. But somewhere along the line, I think after I moved out of the house and into my first real stab at adulthood, both my mother and I figured out that we had a lot of time to make up for, a chance to create a different parent and child relationship. It wasn’t easy, but over time, we changed our path, not always successfully, but better than it ever had been or that I believe it could have been. And when she first got sick, I was so glad I’d taken the chance to let go of my unhappiness, and try something different, because I knew at that point that life was much, much too short. Sometimes there’s a statute of limitations on parental guilt and misery; sometimes, there isn’t. I’ve never been a paragon of well-rounded mature adultness, and in a lot of ways, neither was my mother, but between the two of us, somehow we found territory where we could declare a truce.
I’m also not a spiritual person, religion leaves me cold and I have no great faith in a higher power or anything like that, but I believe that people can bestow moments of grace upon each other, and that all but the worst of us are capable of experiencing grace. I realized, after Mom’s first remission, and the subsequent bout with cancer again, that in getting along better, in learning to like each other, we had experienced that grace. I was grateful for it later, even though whenever I think about the good times we had, I find it hard to separate them from those last few horrifying days. When she first got sick, I started to remember all the better things about my childhood that I’d forgotten — how she took me to R-rated movies back in the heyday of the ‘70s cinema explosion because I’d developed a passion for film, and was too young to see things like Chinatown by myself. How she convinced Dad to give me a stereo for Christmas once, because she knew I wanted to listen to my music in my room, with headphones, and not have to share it with the house. How she let me force her to listen to my latest bootleg Springsteen tapes when I’m sure she wanted to scream. Gradually things came back to me, and each time I was reminded that there had been seeds of a better relationship there all along, we just hadn’t been able to understand what they were. We’d been graced, but unable to see it because we were mired in anger and bitterness.
Because her birthday had always been around Christmas (as was my dad’s, two days after the holiday), and my twin’s and mine around Thanksgiving, she’d always made an effort to make sure people were remembered despite holidays. While everyone else wanted to give us one gift to share or matching gifts, whether Evil Twin and I wanted the same things or not, Mom never did that. I never really knew, though, if she liked celebrating her birthday; though most of my life, she always said her age was 39, a la Jack Benny, something I didn’t get then but totally get now. For her last one, shortly before she died, we had no idea what else to give her than stuff for her stamp collecting, or hats and warm clothing to put on her wasted body to keep warm, even though she could never get warm. She’d gone back into chemo for that Christmas and birthday, so she was pretty miserable and was starting to lose what little hair had grown back from the first treatment. She was no longer able to do the artistic things she did so beautifully (but could never believe were beautiful), so she concentrated on her stamps. After Christmas was long over, I went down to our house and stayed with her for the afternoon while my dad was off at some environmental thing or other. We got out the new manuals we’d given her for Christmas, and started trying to match some of her new stamps that we’d also bought for her with the books. She was perpetually in her ratty pajamas by that point, and I teased her about the bad fashion effect of jammies and a PolarFleece hat worn together. After a few hours she got tired, and I put the books away, and gave her her reclining chair back. By the time I left she was battling nausea, and was huddled up in her blanket, a miniature, blasted-out shell of the person I’d known all my life. She’d already forgotten most of what we talked about — some old stories about her and Dad that I’d never heard, some background on her family in Minnesota — because chemo had made her really forgetful, and I joked often about how every day was like a new day for Mom, because she couldn’t remember stuff.
The next time I saw her she was dying. It was harder because I knew that every decision that had been made leading up to her death had been made by me. Either through action or omission of action, I’d led her there, and I never have, and probably never will, come to grips with that. We have these visions of peaceful, tearful hospice deaths, a lot of times, images that are encouraged by pretty hospital brochures or weepy television movies, so that the reality of sudden, unexpected and very ugly death completely destroys us with its grim reality. And as great as therapy is, there are scars that no amount of time or therapy can erase. Every year on her birthday, I think about that, both the scars and the moments of grace, and I wish the latter would help erase the former, but I know it will never happen. Sometimes I wonder why the one isn’t more powerful than the other. Maybe for truly spiritual and mature and well-adjusted people, it is, but for me, it hasn’t been. Her birthday is both a celebration to me of the second chance we gave ourselves, and a painful reminder of how short a time that second chance was.
And I guess that’s why, when I write, whether it’s fanfic or my supposed real life writing that never seems to go anywhere, I almost always write about things like love (lost or granted), the importance of forgiveness and the power of grace on someone else, or the profound effect any affection has on a human being. My life got changed by those things, admittedly late, and I figure if two cranky, immature, dislikable, unpleasant, and not especially bright people like Mom and me can find some forgiveness and love inside ourselves, and bestow it on each other, then anyone’s capable of it. So it’s a very one-note creative topic, I suppose, that I keep coming back to, but something I spend almost all my creative time thinking about, because for so much of the past decade it’s been the biggest emotional influence on my life.
The day before my mom’s first surgery, I was terrified about the prospects, because she was in such bad shape. I went out to the garden that I’d had to abandon for the summer in order to take care of her, and was standing by my butterfly bush, when suddenly two yellow swallowtail butterflies started flying around me, twisting and turning, over and around, up and down, for quite some time. As the butterflies danced around me, I thought, no matter what happens tomorrow, life goes on all around me. There will always be life going on around me. I try to remember that every December 9, so that I won’t remember only the bad things that happened afterwards. It’s hard; some years are harder than others, like this one, to remember. But I try.
I used to know a woman who was a fairly respected poet, and in her poems, she often examined her feelings about her father and his death. We were talking after my mom died about the grieving process, and I mentioned how exasperated everyone around me was already, even though it had been only a few weeks, that I hadn’t got over the death. Everyone’s parents die, I suppose the thinking goes, so get on with it. She talked about how she still hadn’t got over it, and I knew that from reading her work, but she didn’t discuss it much otherwise except as occasion warranted. I asked how she finally got to a point where she didn’t think about her dad every hour of every day. She told me “I never have. I just stopped talking about it.” That really affected me, because I think that, especially in western cultures, we expect people to shut up about it, we expect grieving to be a quick and tidy process, and one that leaves no lingering scars. I know there are people who’ve known me for years reading this right now, and thinking, “oh, get over it finally, for god’s sake.” Culturally, there isn’t a lot of room for the emotional differences in our individual makeups, an acknowledgement of how none of us handle things the same way, and how different the circumstances are around anyone’s specific loss. I’ve tried on a few occasions to tell people how agonizing, gruesome, and torturous my mother’s last day was, but if I’m able to handle it, they usually aren’t, and I’ve never finished the story any time I’ve tried to tell it — either through my own inability, or they begged me to stop.
For most of my life, my parents and I did not get along at all. Our relationship was rocky, to say the least, violent, and emotionally stunted. But somewhere along the line, I think after I moved out of the house and into my first real stab at adulthood, both my mother and I figured out that we had a lot of time to make up for, a chance to create a different parent and child relationship. It wasn’t easy, but over time, we changed our path, not always successfully, but better than it ever had been or that I believe it could have been. And when she first got sick, I was so glad I’d taken the chance to let go of my unhappiness, and try something different, because I knew at that point that life was much, much too short. Sometimes there’s a statute of limitations on parental guilt and misery; sometimes, there isn’t. I’ve never been a paragon of well-rounded mature adultness, and in a lot of ways, neither was my mother, but between the two of us, somehow we found territory where we could declare a truce.
I’m also not a spiritual person, religion leaves me cold and I have no great faith in a higher power or anything like that, but I believe that people can bestow moments of grace upon each other, and that all but the worst of us are capable of experiencing grace. I realized, after Mom’s first remission, and the subsequent bout with cancer again, that in getting along better, in learning to like each other, we had experienced that grace. I was grateful for it later, even though whenever I think about the good times we had, I find it hard to separate them from those last few horrifying days. When she first got sick, I started to remember all the better things about my childhood that I’d forgotten — how she took me to R-rated movies back in the heyday of the ‘70s cinema explosion because I’d developed a passion for film, and was too young to see things like Chinatown by myself. How she convinced Dad to give me a stereo for Christmas once, because she knew I wanted to listen to my music in my room, with headphones, and not have to share it with the house. How she let me force her to listen to my latest bootleg Springsteen tapes when I’m sure she wanted to scream. Gradually things came back to me, and each time I was reminded that there had been seeds of a better relationship there all along, we just hadn’t been able to understand what they were. We’d been graced, but unable to see it because we were mired in anger and bitterness.
Because her birthday had always been around Christmas (as was my dad’s, two days after the holiday), and my twin’s and mine around Thanksgiving, she’d always made an effort to make sure people were remembered despite holidays. While everyone else wanted to give us one gift to share or matching gifts, whether Evil Twin and I wanted the same things or not, Mom never did that. I never really knew, though, if she liked celebrating her birthday; though most of my life, she always said her age was 39, a la Jack Benny, something I didn’t get then but totally get now. For her last one, shortly before she died, we had no idea what else to give her than stuff for her stamp collecting, or hats and warm clothing to put on her wasted body to keep warm, even though she could never get warm. She’d gone back into chemo for that Christmas and birthday, so she was pretty miserable and was starting to lose what little hair had grown back from the first treatment. She was no longer able to do the artistic things she did so beautifully (but could never believe were beautiful), so she concentrated on her stamps. After Christmas was long over, I went down to our house and stayed with her for the afternoon while my dad was off at some environmental thing or other. We got out the new manuals we’d given her for Christmas, and started trying to match some of her new stamps that we’d also bought for her with the books. She was perpetually in her ratty pajamas by that point, and I teased her about the bad fashion effect of jammies and a PolarFleece hat worn together. After a few hours she got tired, and I put the books away, and gave her her reclining chair back. By the time I left she was battling nausea, and was huddled up in her blanket, a miniature, blasted-out shell of the person I’d known all my life. She’d already forgotten most of what we talked about — some old stories about her and Dad that I’d never heard, some background on her family in Minnesota — because chemo had made her really forgetful, and I joked often about how every day was like a new day for Mom, because she couldn’t remember stuff.
The next time I saw her she was dying. It was harder because I knew that every decision that had been made leading up to her death had been made by me. Either through action or omission of action, I’d led her there, and I never have, and probably never will, come to grips with that. We have these visions of peaceful, tearful hospice deaths, a lot of times, images that are encouraged by pretty hospital brochures or weepy television movies, so that the reality of sudden, unexpected and very ugly death completely destroys us with its grim reality. And as great as therapy is, there are scars that no amount of time or therapy can erase. Every year on her birthday, I think about that, both the scars and the moments of grace, and I wish the latter would help erase the former, but I know it will never happen. Sometimes I wonder why the one isn’t more powerful than the other. Maybe for truly spiritual and mature and well-adjusted people, it is, but for me, it hasn’t been. Her birthday is both a celebration to me of the second chance we gave ourselves, and a painful reminder of how short a time that second chance was.
And I guess that’s why, when I write, whether it’s fanfic or my supposed real life writing that never seems to go anywhere, I almost always write about things like love (lost or granted), the importance of forgiveness and the power of grace on someone else, or the profound effect any affection has on a human being. My life got changed by those things, admittedly late, and I figure if two cranky, immature, dislikable, unpleasant, and not especially bright people like Mom and me can find some forgiveness and love inside ourselves, and bestow it on each other, then anyone’s capable of it. So it’s a very one-note creative topic, I suppose, that I keep coming back to, but something I spend almost all my creative time thinking about, because for so much of the past decade it’s been the biggest emotional influence on my life.
The day before my mom’s first surgery, I was terrified about the prospects, because she was in such bad shape. I went out to the garden that I’d had to abandon for the summer in order to take care of her, and was standing by my butterfly bush, when suddenly two yellow swallowtail butterflies started flying around me, twisting and turning, over and around, up and down, for quite some time. As the butterflies danced around me, I thought, no matter what happens tomorrow, life goes on all around me. There will always be life going on around me. I try to remember that every December 9, so that I won’t remember only the bad things that happened afterwards. It’s hard; some years are harder than others, like this one, to remember. But I try.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 02:04 pm (UTC)It sounds to me like, in your grief, you're honoring your mom's memory. However complicated your relationship may have been, and however horrible her dying may have been, I hope you're able to find some small comfort in remembering her and remembering how you were able to change your relationship.
Don't worry about being a "one-note" writer. Some of the most powerful work I know (poems, in this case) focuses on the "one note" of what it means to live and love as mortals, and I never stop being moved by it. (Marie Howe's What the Living Do and Donald Hall's Without are both completely amazing collections of poems. The Donald Hall in particular makes me weep every time I read all the way through it, but it's worth it because it's just so good, and because I think it's good to remember now and again that this is something we all suffer, at some time or another...)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 02:34 pm (UTC)I have been very lucky to have a good relationship with my mother and I know that when she passes away, I will never get over it. It scares me to think about. I'm not sure what I'll do when I cannot call my mother every night or if something good or bad happens. When someone who has such an impact on your life dies it really never stops affecting you. So much of your life to that date was intertwined with theirs and their views so often intersected with your own, for better or for worse, that everyday life without their influence is a new experience.
I'm glad you had the chance to find peace with your mom and build on that love and those moments of grace. Finding that closeness to her again makes your loss even more painful, I'm sure, but the pain of loss seems less sad to me than the pain of regret. I hope you find peace with good memories over the holiday.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 03:00 pm (UTC)*more hugs*
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:49 am (UTC)And thank you, again, for the paid LJ time -- you are just the sweetest!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 03:16 pm (UTC)And don't worry about the recurring theme in your writing. That's the big stuff. Better different looks at the complexity of one issue than lots of empty works about a variety of nothing.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:51 am (UTC)I will keep that next to the computer when I'm writing and going, "god, can't I write about anything else?" and thinking I should give it up. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 10:07 pm (UTC)Stories like your so sad one is important if it helps us remember something we frequently forget - we must always appreciate what we have. Because you never know when it might go.
tina
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 10:41 pm (UTC)http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C040301
Affirmation and Gold. Lovely. I hadn't read him before, so I appreciate the ref. So many poets, so little time...
Marie Howe has some poems here,but the site is goofy and someone justified her lines!! Sacrilege! But worth reading:
http://lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/archives/cat_marie_howe.html
and one here:
http://www.alittlepoetry.com/howe.html
and hey, she's recommended by Margaret Atwood, so I'm sold! :-)
tina
no subject
Date: 2003-12-09 10:09 pm (UTC)Stories like your so sad one is important if it helps us remember something we frequently forget - we must always appreciate what we have. Because you never know when it might go.
tina
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 03:47 am (UTC)Because you think you're doing a mighty fine job of coping and then something unexpected happens to make you realise that you've still got a long way to go. Personally, I've tried to celebrate my mother, rather than mourn her, such as making my family go to her favourite seaside resort for a day trip on the anniversary of her death and taking my dad out for dinner to celebrate their marriage on what would have been their wedding anniversary.
I don't know what else to do.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 12:01 pm (UTC)And I know what you mean about thinking you're coping, and getting that little unexpected reminder. Takes the wind out of your sails, no matter how well you might be doing.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 12:03 pm (UTC)